Folklife follow-up

Wow! While attending the Texas Folklife Festival on Friday evening (it goes from Thursday evening thru Sunday afternoon and evening), I felt a great sense of delight and enjoyment. So much so that I was tempted to return on Sunday. (But I stuck with attending evening church instead, which turned into a blessing in itself!)

Highlight of this year's Folklife, I suppose, was my interaction with "Professor Katzenjammer". I had seen him at various times at Folklife thru'out the years. But I'd simply considered him some crazy guy who liked to come to Folklife in this outlandish costume of German lederhosen, an alpine cap covered with buttons and pins, and an over-wide and over-long necktie hanging to his bare knees.

Then Friday's newspaper in its coverage of Folklife gave a short biography about Prof. Katzenjammer, who does emcee work during the festival. He's the alter ego of Robert Thonhoff, a retired teaching principal from the rural community of Fashing southeast of here. This in itself immediately earned points in my estimation! And the article told how Thonhoff was going to retire his alter ego after this, the 35th annual festival. Reading about Thonhoff and his Deutsch persona inspired me to to look him up at Folklife and have my picture taken with him.

Partly because of my new interest in the retiring "Professor" I think I spent more time absorbing the various elements of Deutsch culture at this year's festival: sopng, dance, food. I even got to learn a German folk dance when Der Deutsch Volksdanzverein (sp?) invited a few audience members to join them onstage to dance "The Great Atlantic". Our reward for "cutting the fool" in "cutting the rug" -- actually the dance was very simple! -- was a tri-ribbon pin-on, each ribbon in one of Deutschland's colors of red, yellow and black.

Oh, I did experience also other of Texas' exciting mosaic of cultures at this year's Folklife, including a Mexican mariachi group and a Scottish folk-dance group. There was the Bill Smallwood Band playing country music - in a broad sense, because the band performed the "Mickey Mouse Club" theme song (somewhat "country-fied"). I delighted to tell Bill how that song was the melody for my high school's fight song. Borah HS had begun classes while the Club was enormously popular, as was its theme song.

The "day" at Folklife ended with me under the dome inside the Institute of Texan Cultures building. There's a regular dome show of slides and music, called "Faces & Places of Texas". (From the folks' garb in the slide pictures one can tell that the show was put together for HemisFair '68 -- but even tho' dated it's fun to watch.) However, the show I watched was a new one (projected against only one side of the dome) in tribute to the late O.T. Baker, founder of the Texas Folklife Festival in '72. The tribute was built around the popular country-rock song "God Blessed Texas" -- a very fitting homage to a man who had so loved Texan folkways.

. God blessed Texas, with His own hand
. Dropped down angels from the Promised Land.
. Gave them a place where they could dance,
. If you wanna see Heaven, brother,
. Here's your chance.
. I've been sent to spread the message,
. "Mmmm, God blessed Texas!"